Xiang Songzuo, October 23, 2019 Xiang Songzuo (向松祚) is an economist, and a professor of the School of Finance and Finance of Renmin University of China. His speech in December 2018, A Great Shift Unseen Over the Last Forty Years, translated by China Change, was widely disseminated. This short, recent commentary below was immediately censored on Weibo and WeChat.  — The Editors According to official data, China’s GDP growth rate in the third quarter fell to 6 percent, and will likely fall below that in the fourth. Next year, it is sure to enter the era of 5 percent. If you look at corporate profits, fiscal revenue and other indicators, things don’t add up and the official GDP growth rate is clearly inflated. In the […]

Xiang Songzuo, December 28, 2018 On Dec. 16, Prof. Xiang Songzuo (向松祚) of Renmin University School of Finance and former chief economist of China Agriculture Bank, gave a 25-minute speech during a CEO class at Renmin Business School that was apparently applauded by the audience but immediately censored over the Chinese internet. Singling out 2018 as the year when China comes to a large shift unprecedented over the past 40 years, the speech can be seen as a landscape survey of Chinese economy, and obliquely, also of politics. Just as Tsinghua law professor Xu Zhangrun’s (许章润) broadside “Imminent Fears, Immediate Hopes”, which was superbly translated and widely talked about among China watchers, Prof. Xiang’s speech is another rare burst of Chinese intellectuals’ discontent with the […]